Transcendence and Middleworld
First draft (august 2007)
copyright Gero
Jenner
1 Human knowledge and the unthinkable
2 The enemies of transcendence
4 The light and the dark sides of the moon
5 A man of Crete and the impasses of reason
9 A contradiction inherent in man
12 On possible and impossible wonders and mysteries
The world is unthinkable. Reason only illuminates its inner core: that part of space and time which we cover with our senses and instruments. To the Middleworld we belong, there we achieve those triumphs we call by the name of Science. Beyond this familiar territory lies a terra incognita or what we may call transcendence. In the history of human thought we discern an effort to negate transcendence.
However, there is an evident reason for the fact that man is incapable of transcending Middleworld. His senses as well as his thought organ are made to understand that part of the universe where he dwells not the universe as a whole (the one to which for the sake of brevity I will hence refer as Allworld).
As a first illustration of our point let us consider freedom. When using this concept or its opposite namely constraint or necessity, we refer to notions with obvious content in Middleworld. According to basic and intuitive understanding freedom is characterized by the absence of constraint. Objects as well as living beings behave in unforeseeable ways. Men think without there being any definite rules that govern their thoughts. On the contrary we speak of lack of freedom when recognizing the presence of constraints. Any law of nature, such as for instance gravity, testifies to the influence of such constraints. Generally speaking, we recognize lack of freedom wherever science is able to detect the presence of rules while freedom manifests itself in the absence of regularity culminating in chaos. Here the behavior of things or living beings does not conform to any recognizable pattern, it is therefore unpredictable.
In Middleworld we grasp the meaning of orderliness only through its opposite, namely chaos, and chaos only through regularity, just as we understand notions like left and right, high and low, warm and cold only as relative differences between bipolar terms. Without the existence of what we term chaos we wouldn`t be able to form an idea of orderliness – and vice versa.
So far we move on terra firma, but once we leave Middleworld the ground becomes slippery. The very notions obtained from Middleworld loose their quality of being thinkable one we leave its familiar precincts. They no longer preserve their accustomed sense; their use leads to nowhere or to manifestly absurd conclusions. We see this when turning again to the notion of freedom. Intuitively we know exactly what we mean by affirming that our thoughts are free. As long as we are healthy and mentally sane, we are convinced that they are not subject to any constraints which would make them predictable to others. But no sooner do we consider the more fundamental question what freedom really means, than we are suddenly at a loss. Can we give it any definite meaning all of its own, that is, without reference to the absence of rules and constraints? We can`t. In vain we try to find out where our free thoughts come from. Must we not even call them haphazard and arbitrary if ungoverned by regularities?
These questions lead to nowhere, so they are soon discarded. They simply do not allow of meaningful answers because we have passed the boundaries of Middleworld. Beyond its frontiers (that is beyond the bipolar notional tandem of freedom/ constraint) the idea of freedom looses its intuitive content. It turns into an amorphous entity.
Middleworld notions turn out to be equally futile once one of their bipolar opposites such as freedom or determinism is burdened with exclusive validity. That is what those scientists do who try to convince us that human actions and thoughts, though free according to intuitive understanding, are essentially unfree or determined. These scientists – among them even so brilliant and admirable ones as Bertrand Russell[1] - fall wholeheartedly into the trap of logical fallacy. They relate to the whole of Allworld those very notions which do not make sense beyond Middleworld. Once we take a closer look at their statement that all phenomena of nature human - thoughts not excluded - are subject to universal determinism, we hit on its inherent bias. It turns out to be meaningless and self-contradicting. Meaningless because in a world totally determined we would no longer be able to say what on earth we understand by determinism. We simply don`t grasp its meaning without knowing what freedom is. Self-contradictory, since the scientific theory proclaiming such general determinism would itself have to be a predetermined product. This means that it would share its worthlessness with any other statement produced under absolute constraint.
Given such a logical strait, it should go without saying that meaningless and self-contradictory assumptions may neither be empirically confirmed nor rejected. Of course, we will find out many more deterministic processes in the future course of scientific research just as we did in the past, many of them pertaining to our bodily self and perhaps even to some basic aspects of our psychic constitution, but at the same time we will hit upon an equal mass of undetermined phenomena in all fields of nature. Empirical findings cannot possibly alter this general picture. Not even those findings which due to fashion and need of public response temporarily dominate scientific debate. Some neurologists, for instance, currently believe to have offered a clear empirical solution to the problem of freedom versus determinism. The debate was aroused through experiments carried out by Benjamin Libet in 1979. In painstaking records the scientist measured the temporal sequence of acts of volition and the corresponding muscular disposition. Results proved to be unequivocal. On average muscular disposition preceded the corresponding act of volition by 350 to 550 milliseconds. Hence some neurologists (not Libet himself) concluded that conscious acts of volition, far from being the cause of their muscular manifestations, in fact succeed them by a considerable lag of time. They take this to be an empirical proof for their contention that »men do not do what they want but want what they do«. This means that their thoughts and behavior are not free but determined.
But such a conclusion is totally unwarranted. Apart from the above mentioned basic objections which put this problem beyond any possible empirical solution, it is easily to see (and had in fact already be seen by Libet himself) why such results do not in any way resolve the question. If both the act of volition and its physical expression are themselves mere manifestations of an even deeper lying reality which is like freedom itself situated beyond Middleworld, the results of these experiments do not prove anything. They certainly do not confirm determinism.
Let us now choose space for our second example. Evidently, our understanding of space too originates in and is made for Middleword. Only here do we know exactly what we mean by boundaries and their absence. Bodies produce boundaries in three-dimensional space. On the other hand, where there is no recognizable body there are no boundaries and we speak of free space. We have no difficulty in using these terms as long as we apply them to Middleworld. However, no sooner do we use them to refer to the world as a whole, than they abandon us. They loose their sense and lead into contradictions. Allworld cannot have boundaries, for we are used to always hitting on further space or further bodies within Middleworld. But neither can Allworld be without boundaries, for such boundlessness not only transcends our spatial sense but is apt to plunge us into a state of acute disorientation and dizziness. We hasten to turn back to our well-grasped and well-known Middleworld. Or we proceed even further, taking pains to ward off all further meetings with disturbing transcendence.
To speak of curved space is one such device. Indeed, boundlessness becomes harmless when illustrated with reference to the surface of spheres where it turns into a normal property of things within Middleworld. We lean back as if we had solved a problem. In fact, we only closed our all too daring eyes to the shattering experience of transcendence.
The
scientific opponents of transcendence normally strive to establish
something
like total explanation which is coupled to a more or less distinct
vision of
total mastership over things. Grounded with their feet in Middleworld,
they mean to reach with their heads up into Allworld
which they believe to be a mere extension of the former. In such way
they
overcome, expulse and scientifically reject transcendence. The world
thus
established is either characterized by pervading order; it is marked by
inescapable determinism as in classical physics since the time of
Keeping away the disturbing experience of transcendence may be done in different ways. For instance, by simply warding it off as we may ward off all questions on the consequences and meaning, say, of unbridled consumption, amusement or work. Surely, in Middleword we don`t risk any harm when suppressing the experience of transcendence. Firmly fettered to the pale of the here and now, we simply keep our sight fixed on the ground near our feet - the immediately and clearly visible facts. How superbly successful man may become through such self-restraint, is sufficiently proved by three hundred years of science.
But overlooking the reality of transcendence is by no means the only way. Science, whose achievements in the education of reason can hardly be overemphasized, must nevertheless bear the blame of not only overlooking but actively concealing and expressly denying transcendence.
For science has falsely identified Middleworld, the one for which our senses and our understanding are made, with Allworld or its totality. The reason why they tended to follow this course was their aspiration for total explanation and total control. With systematic persistence they did all they could in order to expel from reality every reminiscence of transcendence. As a matter of course, miracles, mysteries or overpowering might could have no place on scientific planet. The experts of knowledge aimed at calming down all possible doubts and unrest. In their universe the unexplainable or even boundaries of human knowledge could and should not exist. The very triumphs of science lent credit as well as specious authority to such a remarkable abdication of reason.
But even Middleworld is far from being a well known country. What we term »scientific explanation« does not in fact lead beyond its boundaries. Explaining or making something plain for reason means that we substitute things as well as events that are well known or to which we are accustomed for others less known or less habitual. For instance, when referring to electromagnetic phenomena, we shed light on their essential nature by terming them waves. For these belong to everyday experience in the shape of specific modification on water surfaces. Scientific explanation thus relies on the binding together of different parts of reality. Even science can only elucidate parts of Middleworld by referring to other parts. In a broader way, we may say that it elucidates images by means of other images using those that are well known and, above all, well and unequivocally defined in order to illuminate the less known or ill defined ones.
In this general manner scientific explanation proceeds even in cases where something quite commonplace and familiar is explained by means of notions quite unfamiliar to the layman, such as, for instance mathematical formula describing the wave shape of water or electromagnetic radiation. Here explanation dissolves something complex like an empirically given waveform into its basic elements, namely mathematical order. Again, a complex, ill defined or less known empirical total is reduced into elements which are simple, well defined and for this reason better known at least to the scientific expert.
What interests us here, is the basic insight that we never grasp reality by means outside its bounds. This is, of course, evident in physics the first among natural sciences. Physics relies on terms like bodies and their properties (like mass, volume, velocity etc.), waves and their properties (like wavelength, amplitudes etc.) or on still more abstract notions like energy where a multitude of concrete phenomena are merged. Whatever it does, physics always remains and must remain within Middleworld since it never takes its »images« including the basic formula of mathematics (see below) from beyond its territory.
One of its basic images is evolution of the later out of the earlier and of the composite out of the simple. We find numerous examples of evolution in most familiar events of Middleworld. Huge plants grow out of small seeds, chicken grow out of eggs, men construct towering houses out of tiny bricks. Since earliest time when men started to think about world as a whole, they used these familiar images in order to explain evolution writ large. They construed, for instance, cosmologies where some heavenly lord creates all things out of nothing. Here imagination is clearly linked to a master builder in Middleworld using bricks in order to construct a house according to a preconceived plan. However, images such as seeds or eggs do not presuppose a planning being. When these are used in cosmologies, evolution is explained as something happening in a predetermined way without any hidden intention. Modern physics exclusively relies on the second type of image. It its vision of cosmogony it lets the world start at a certain point zero (popularly called the Big Bang), from which it then evolves in successive stages up to its present shape.
But whatever images man chose in order to explain the origin, nature and evolution of world as a whole, they all turned out to lead him into insurmountable difficulties. Unless he foreclosed all too far-reaching questions by surrounding his thoughts with interdictions and dogmas, he was at one point or other invariably confronted with the breakdown of images. In other words, he was bound to hit on transcendence.
If, for instance, he imagined some manlike being as the builder of universe, he could only by dogmatic fiat avoid the further question as to who in turn created the builder. And even supposed that mythology had provided an answer (as is the case in Greek mythology), the question as to who in turn created the latter remained still open – and so force in an unending series. The unthinkable always lurked at the horizon and got nearer and nearer the more man tried to make himself free of Middleworld. So questions were abruptly ended at some arbitrary point in order to avoid the confrontations with transcendence.
Physics is no exception to this rule even if it expresses itself in a more gradual way. Images loose so to speak color as well as contour the more they are applied to the fringes of Middleworld that is to realms of the very great or the extremely small. Minuscule particles like electrons do neither behave like bodies – though in certain situations they fully conform to this model – nor do they fully behave like waves – though under certain conditions they may be legitimately treated as such. Bodies and waves being typical representatives of Middleworld, have only limited value for our understanding of micro-world. The same failure of its images and notions is experienced by physics when it ventures out into the realm of macrocosm. Points in universe which may devour entire universes (called black holes or otherwise), worlds expanding into an infinite space which comes into being only because of such expansion, periods of time becoming time only by virtue of a point zero where all things begin – these conceptions are void of any conceivable content. In fact, they are signals of conceptional dissolution and decay – the fate of understanding when it reaches out to transcendence.
Even then mathematics maintains a position of privilege – at least up to a certain point. While images be they bodies or waves all fail at some point, the formula of mathematics still create bridges between events of quantum physics. Far removed as they are from ordinary Middleworld imagination, they are none the less still amenable to the purely quantitative analysis of measurable effects. And their mathematical description still allows prediction and manipulation.
Does this mean that mathematics is a privileged tool leading us beyond Middleworld? Is mathematics the only universal language, the language of God as imagined by Pythagoras, Plato and their followers?
By no means. It only seems as if quantitative signals from the fringes and quantitatively controlled impacts on events in the subatomic sphere would make us independent from Middleworld imagery. The elements of mathematics and the operations between them do not stand apart from Middleworld; they are extracted out of the things of this world. Mathematical sets and their units are abstract bodies and as such only conceivable in space while basic mathematical operations like addition, subtraction etc. are activities in time. All mathematical operations are temporally organized games with spatial objects though these are devoid of any concrete characteristics. Therefore all artificially created mathematical arrangements proposed by their inventors in the cause of generations, are reflections or twins of actually existing structures of order as to be found in Middleworld. When abandoning himself to the play with sets and possible operations the mathematician emulates nature by his creativeness: By his actions thinkable structures of order come for a second time into being but they don`t represent a new and different world. The most astonishing results of such creative endeavors certainly show themselves at the moment when again and again some most eccentric formula suddenly proves to be the exact description of an orderly process in Middleworld.
Even nearby reality, however, is not characterized by mere orderliness (structures of natural laws); even in Middleworld order stands next to chaos, necessity comes next to chance). And once we leave the realm of Middleworld reaching out to its fringes – as in point zero of cosmogony or at the boundaries of space – there is no longer any discernible order. Mathematics may still describe its residual manifestations in the shape of remaining structures of chaos, but after further steps into the unknown even mathematics comes to a halt. Mathematics too is a language of Middleworld. It can only reach as far as the latter.
But, as already mentioned, there is an important reservation to be made at this point. Though knowledge comes to a spectacular halt at the fringes of Middleworld we may not even be aware of it. For as long as our enquiries keep within the boundaries of Middleworld, we need not come across or even know anything about transcendence. We are lured into this blindness all the more easily as the field of accessible and even economically fruitful knowledge has a potentially infinite range even within our immediate range. There is probably no limit to new discoveries, no limit to the range of possible knowledge strictly within Middleworld. If only we strenuously gaze at things on the stretch of earth before us, we may entirely forget that infinite heaven extends at the top of our heads.
But what do we need transcendence for?
Let`s first turn our looks to Middleworld. Here we are in no doubt as to what purpose our explanations are good for. They help us to assimilate, understand and finally master outward reality. This is true of humans as of other living beings. They all must be able to find their way within their specific habitat that is to use their inborn sense organs and their mental equipment in order that their part of the world becomes accessible and manageable to them. Ants, bees or whales each have quite their own Middleworld. Within its range all their endeavors in progressive assimilation and mastery aim at making survival easier.
With humans such endeavors are as old as their very history. But a real breakthrough only occurred when all obstacles were removed that up to then interfered with a systematic exploration of nature - obstacles like prejudice, dogma and traditions. More than all centuries before the last three hundred years of science gave wings to progress.
So, our question as to the usefulness of transcendence is quite intriguing. Why do we need it, if it confronts us with the basic incompleteness of knowledge? Won`t such awareness lead us to belittle the value of knowledge or make us think that science has only limited importance for our lives? May consciousness of transcendence not even paralyze scientific exploration as we then no longer give it priority?
That may well be the case. But when keeping this part of the balance sheet in mind, but should be equally be aware of its other side. Scientific interpretation of reality that ideologically denied transcendence has caused at least an equal amount of damage. Indeed, the past three hundred years of human morale testify to a sharp antagonism. On the one hand we find outbreaks of triumph and enthusiasm due to all the fascinating achievements of reason during a period of uninterrupted progress. Large parts of nature deemed up to then inaccessible to understanding and even more so to efficient manipulation, were made to appear like a kind of machinery to be easily comprehended and manipulated by man. Just as man-made mechanisms may be thoroughly understood and managed so outward reality and even man himself as a physiological being were divested of their previous imperviousness. They now appeared as parts of a predictable order.
The first
breakthrough in this remarkable progress of reason was due to Isaac
Newton when
he managed to explain by the same set of natural laws the movements of
falling
apple and of planets circulating in heaven. It now seemed as if
homogenous
space and homogeneous time transformed the whole universe into a single
continuum made transparent by equally universal laws. Scientists now
believed
that eternally unchanging natural causes would produce eternally
identical
natural effects. In nature there could be no real novelty, nothing
really
unpredictable (see below
The theory
of evolution by Charles Darwin then produced a further no less
fulminating
breakthrough. The eternally unchanging world of classical physics was
substantially modified and widened by the notion of change though the
latter
was for the time being confined to biology.
The effects of both comprehensive scientific explanations were basically the same. Regardless of whether you conceive the universe as machinery marked by eternal recurrence or whether as a process of evolution, in both cases you make it thoroughly thinkable. More than anything else the »image« of machines and mechanisms now served as a device to illustrate such conformity to human thinking. For our understanding can conceive of nothing more familiar as a mechanical product produced by ourselves and the functions of which we thoroughly know. By ascribing a machine-like essence to reality man expressed his conviction that he was now capable of understanding and controlling it as thoroughly as a machine. The universe is thinkable – thinkable without limitation – that was now the battle cry of science or rather its article of ideological faith.
As I already emphasized, such a conviction would arouse feelings of triumph and enthusiasm. The eighteenth as well as the subsequent century were imbued with the euphoria of progress. If nature was thinkable that is if it was nothing more imposing than a machine he could easily understand and handle then man was right to ascribe to himself what up to then he had only conferred to God, namely omnipotence. Now he himself was the master of Universe. And this was, of course, tantamount to doing away with transcendence. As there could be no transcendence for God (for otherwise even God would stumble on secrets), there could now be no transcendence for man. Nor could man for this reason any longer accept the idea that he like other beings was by the very nature of his sense organs and mental equipment (even if extended by artificial instruments) necessarily confined to a niche of this world. He now pretended that by his knowledge, sense organs and their artificial extensions he could gain unlimited access to the whole of reality. Classical physics as well as Darwin`s theory on evolution had produced what resembled very much a delirium of omniscience and omnipotence. Its sway over the minds of ordinary men was all the more profound as applied science now spread its boons of ever more sophisticated appliances.
But this was only one side of the balance sheet. The other side was rather less enchanting. It consisted in a sometimes radical repudiation of the basic tenets of science and it often led to profound disorientation culminating in real desperation. For the new world as seen by science was perceived by many as dead and devoid of sense. Here again the image of the universe as a machine played a prominent but now entirely negative role. Whatever man believes to have thoroughly understood and mastered or what he thinks of as subject to his whims like puppets or slaves, turns by that very token into something uninteresting, valueless and dead. Once we identify the universe with a machine, it can offer nor more sense than a machine.
Three centuries now have passed where scientific euphoria on the one hand and despair aroused by science on the other characterized modern man`s state of soul. A steady widening of man`s power over nature was accompanied by an inner process that made man increasingly uncanny in his own eyes. Of course, identifying nature with a machine proved to be quite useful for fostering man`s lordship over it but at the same time it proved to be quite disturbing for his mental health. Since the very beginning of scientific revolution we therefore find unrestrained admiration next to openly declared skepticism or even hostility. Starting with a European-wide movement of romanticism, passing from there to vitalism and finally reaching modern day creationism, there existed more or less violent antiscientific currents in the past and they still exist in the present. It must however be said that they rarely relied on convincing argument; often they used bad or even absurd one.
But why those recurring protests against science whose most conspicuous result certainly is its efficiency in making the lives of man so much easier (let`s forget its most recent potential of self-destruction by nuclear armament and the perspective of ecological collapse by unbound economical growth)? Why this resistance against reason which after all is the fundament of all useful knowledge not only that of scientific research? What is it that motivates many of us to reject the idea of a thinkable world?
In order to answer this question, we should start with arbitrarily dividing nature in two complementary halves: man on the one, his environment on the other side. We can be pretty sure that hardly anybody exists who finds fault with the idea of understanding and controlling the environment. And there are certainly some among our fellow humans who would no more object to the further idea of controlling with equal efficiency other humans around them. But each of us fights with all his might against the control others might want to have or actually have over him. The mere idea that we may be fully predictable in the eyes of other people - be they scientists, politicians or whosoever - so that these people then know about our future thoughts or behavior is simply unbearable and disgusting. Even if we have no qualms to accept the proposed identity of nature with a fully predictable machine, we are still by not prepared to regard ourselves as machines. The course of our own lives as that of past and future generations would seem to us bereft of all meaning if there were no freedom and self-determination but only dire necessity such as we find in soulless mechanisms. Our indifference to mental and physical control gives way to outspoken horror as soon as we apply the image of the machine to ourselves.
But classical physics have done nothing else but to evoke with ideological stubbornness and seemingly irrefutable arguments just this abomination. They insisted that nature can only be conceived of as an indivisible whole. Therefore man cannot be regarded and treated in a different way from the rest of nature. Who dared to oppose such an obvious statement? And their conclusion seemed to be no less evident. If you assume as the most renowned scientists did that nature is entirely governed by necessity than man cannot presume to fall outside necessity. The interpretation that makes man a machine as all other things seemed to flow naturally from nature being itself nothing else than a machine.
As mentioned above, the effect of such scientific ideology which for more than two centuries held sway over man`s thoughts was to lead him either to the deliria of omnipotence or to outbreaks of despair. On the positive side he had gained – at least in theory - nearly unlimited power. Man and nature could be made to be slaves of man; they could now be fully controlled. But on the negative side there was a much harsher loss: meaning, self-determination and freedom, all that given value and worth to life, were now reduced to the status of mere subjective illusions.
But in truth the loss even surpassed the damage done to man`s soul. Even reason had been severely affected because it became hopelessly entangled in self-imposed snares. As scientists now pretended that man should and could be as predictable as was nature, he now found himself in a curious position. He should be both at the same time: a godlike manipulator and a manipulated machine. That was nonsense supported by ideology; it was a self-defeating manifest contradiction which nevertheless was advocated with dogmatic harshness for the length of two centuries. Further questions were proscribed by ideology as they were held to be non-empirical and therefore without interest and value.
But the assumption that human thoughts and actions could be as predictable as certain natural processes leads into unsolvable paradoxes and inescapable impasses. In this respect it resembles the famous statement by Epimenides that all Cretans are liars. As Epimenides himself was a Cretan his statement turns into logical nonsense. It is strictly unthinkable.
However, propositions on the thinking of man are likely to be as unthinkable when self-referring. Now, the statement that our thoughts are not free but determined belongs to exactly such a class of propositions. If really we were able to predict future thoughts with the same precision as a lunar eclipse, then our notion of truth would loose its meaning as well as its possibility. All our discussions on true or false, all our hypotheses and theories in other words science at large would not merely become superfluous but outright impossible since no statement or thought would be better or worse than any other. Indeed, all of them would be equally necessary as they all are produced and determined by hidden laws. Likewise, there could be no more question of man progressively gaining more insight into the working of nature by trial and error. As our thoughts and all behavior linked to it are nothing but determined reflexes such adaptation would be all but impossible. Our initial assertion of predictability thus stumbles right-out into a kind of logical self-destruction.
So the latter-day self-interpretation of man as a machine – the dogma of determinism – has the same effect as the before-mentioned sentence by Epimenides: it leads to an abdication of reason. No wonder, therefore, that all attempts at denying human freedom have only produced theories which soon proved their own worthlessness.[2] The question of human freedom (and hence of transcendence within man himself) cannot be made an empirical issue because it is logical nonsense before any empirical question has even been posed.
However, at a first glance this new point of view doesn`t seem to facilitate our comprehension of the condition of man within nature. Do we have to accept the rather doubtful conclusion that nature consists of two rather different parts? On the one hand a part we may regard as a machine subject to necessity and to our sovereign control and on the other hand the sphere of man where freedom prevails and which for that reason eludes human control? But how do we justify that man alone finds himself in so privileged a position?
Two and a half centuries ago the French master of lucid argument had already seen the inherent paradox. »It would indeed be surprising«, he said in his Traité métaphysique, »if all stars had to submit to eternal laws while only an inconspicuous animal of five feet height should be able to brave them just as his whims command him to do«. Voltaire like before him Spinoza couldn`t believe that all the universe was governed by irrevocable laws while only humans made an exception. This seemed to be a rather unlikely and fantastic assumption.
Such unlikelihood did indeed prevail up to the beginning of the twentieth century, more precisely, up to the discovery of quantum physics. Up to that time an almost unchallenged scientific ideology had declared nature to be essentially nothing else than a huge machinery of predictable operations.
But with quantum physics, there occurred an epochal reshuffling of thoughts. Physicists themselves overcame the ideological dogma that what happened in nature had to be fully determined. For quantum physics did away with this dogma. The most surprising examples are well known. It may suffice to mention just one. The decay of radioactive nuclei is subject to a well defined statistical law named »half-life« but it has proved impossible on theoretical grounds to predict the dispatch of any single alpha particle. Freedom in the guise of chance was thus accepted in physics and reintroduced into nature.
With regard to the history of human knowledge this was indeed a monumental step. Nature was by no means a divided entity; it was one and the same whether one thought of man or of things. But in strict opposition to what classical physicists had believed – and on their tracks many philosophers and exponents of the humanities too – such newly found unity did not entail general determinism but gave nature a much wider shape. It now embraced predictability as well as the unpredictable. In the guise of chance physics now accepted that very indeterminism the existence of which it had for two century denied with unwavering stubbornness.
Nature thus understood faithfully reflected the inherent polarity of man`s intuitive understanding. For now it was again made of orderliness and of chance – the meaning of which we only understand by opposing with reference to each other. For what chance means when taken in isolation, that is what it means by essence or origin is beyond our understanding. We do know that it does not obey any rule but that is all. Chance opens a window into transcendence.
However, we do have an intuitive understanding of chance as it appears within ourselves. There we give it the name of freedom. What freedom means (though we don`t grasp its origin and essence) has already been said by Friedrich Schiller: »Man () has () the privilege to break the ring of necessity () by his power of will and to start an entirely new series of events«.
Transcendence dwells right in the heart of human beings. For as I just said there is no possible way of imparting to it any absolute meaning beyond the trivial one we give it in Middleworld. Freedom remains a mystery, omnipresent and unthinkable at the same time.
Not man alone, nature too now assumes transcendental aspects. On each of its evolutionary stages it reveals specific orderliness: lawful structures succeeding each other but underivable from previous stages. This is an elementary truth physics encounters at any point of the time-scale. As well as it may know plasma immediately after point zero (the so called Big Bang), this knowledge does by no means enable the prediction of what was to come later namely the cosmos of stars with all the elements and molecules that formed part of them. And again knowledge however complete of stars and all extent inorganic matter in universe, provided no instrument for the prediction of life. Nor does an encyclopedic understanding of life provide any cue which would enable us to derive the emergence of emotional and mental qualities. This truth becomes obvious with regard to our present point on the time-scale of evolution. Except for recurring events like eclipses etc., we are incapable of predicting what nature and man will be like in billions of years. Science can only make extrapolations based on existing structures of natural law but it cannot have any knowledge of laws still to develop. At any stage of becoming man hits on transcendence.
Among physicists Werner Heisenberg and other exponents of quantum physics have discovered the unthinkable and the transcendent within the realm of the very small. Among philosophers the same insight was gained by that outstanding visionary Henri Bergson (though not without a superfluous addition of the irrational) and by Nicolai Hartmann who was the first to give a coherent expression to the new understanding of nature. Bergson held evolution to be a creative process. Nicolai Hartmann followed the gradual unfolding of the inorganic spheres up to the creation of life and from there to the emergence of emotional and mental qualities. These successive stages in the unfolding of nature are characterized each by their own sets of order (structures of law), but in such a way that those of previous stages are preserved in higher ones and provide, so to speak, the fundament on which the latter are based. Thus the history of the universe revealed itself to be a creative process. Successive stages of order transparent to scientific thinking follow each other in a strictly unthinkable way.
However, scientists normally repudiate the term »creation« or »creative« using instead the more matter-of-fact term of chance. This is acceptable as long as they mean chance to refer to what lies beyond understanding. However, as it certainly does not evoke positive associations it is not really a recommendable term. Chance is normally considered to be something quite worthless. If used in connection with the emergence of successive evolutionary stages in nature, such a term appears quite inappropriate. It gives the curious impression as if evolution is from its very start imbued with worthlessness. But chance as an explanatory term for all that is new in evolution becomes truly ridiculous when it is based on a machine the so called random generator. In this case we use a dingy »image« taken out of Middleworld in order to explain the infinity of universal creation. This is an even more grotesque aberration than the one committed by those who deny the existence of human freedom.
When seen against the background of classical physics and its determinism the teachings of Nicolai Hartmann on evolutionary strata truly present a new revolutionary departure. Konrad Lorenz the Austrian behavioral scientist further substantiated the findings of Hartmann with empirical insights from biology and animal behavior. And Lorenz has replaced the objectionable term chance with a much better one. He speaks of »fulguration« which refers to the eye blinding action of flashes of lightning. Of course, this notion too has no more real content than chance, but it conveys a more positive emotional overtone. It means evolutionary freedom or the unthinkable.
In fact, such freedom now becomes a constitutive ingredient within inorganic up to biological evolution – and is even to be found in each of us. For evolution is no abstract thing but is propelled by the everyday behavior of all living beings. The unthinkable thus acquires citizenship next to scientifically discernible order. The ideology of universal predictability has given way to a much more profound insight: the boundaries of knowledge. Or other words, it has given way to transcendence.
Scientific ideology was thereby reduced to what it had always been: a very useful mental instrument for practical purposes. It certainly doesn`t much help the scientist to sharpen the awareness that nature is made both of necessity and of chance (freedom) and that the total surface of surrounding darkness becomes larger even as he widens the circle of light. For in empirical research a scientist never knows beforehand where predictability starts and where he will meet with freedom. For that reason he is well advised to depart from the optimistic premise that he will discover new laws of nature wherever he looks – only this premise can induce him to look for them with utter persistence. But it remains nevertheless true that the only justification for an ideology otherwise so unhealthy to man, is due to such practical usefulness.
Apart from this superficial usefulness there should be no place for ideology in science. Science has opened our eyes for the concrete manifestations of reality. They proved that by persevering und precise observation he could achieve extraordinary practical results, which, on the contrary, were totally inaccessible as long as he relied on preconceived judgments. However, even empirical discipline in serious drawbacks. It could in its turn foster prejudice. For science now tended to belittle all thought which did not cling to immediate observation. Statements that could not be proved or disproved by direct observation were discarded without further ado as they did not seem to have any scientific value.
This
self-imposed offhandedness has done much damage to science. For science
more
than anything else is grounded on basic rules of reason like absence of
self-contradiction etc. The above mentioned statement of the Cretan Epimenides, for instance, that claims all
Cretans to be
liars, obviously cannot be proved or disproved by any amount of
empirical
research. We would certainly not come one step nearer to truth if
scientists
chose to visit
Science should be honest enough to accept a fundamental truth. There are statements on reality the truth-value of which is apparent even before we turn to the facts. This certainly applies to our judgments on freedom and necessity. In fact, in everyday life we always implicitly acknowledge the validity of these bipolar terms. Neurologists like Libet, Roth or others are convinced of telling the truth. As we have seen, this would not be the case, if they really did tell the truth. The logical trap is the same as we found in the words of Epimenides.
The urge to master nature is basic to life; it is inborn in men as well as in all other beings. For animals too try to assimilate their surroundings, without such endeavors survival would be impossible. However, assimilating means that things are made calculable, predictable, without riddles or mysteries. Perforce, man must see through the inherent obstinacy of things lest he be unable to perform even such elementary tasks as the chasing of deer, the cultivation of grain or the domestication of cattle. Every manipulation of things is based on a precise knowledge of its effects. If man wanted to become the master of his environment he had to acquire an ever more precise and encompassing knowledge of nature`s habits and regularities. Seen in this way, modern science is nothing else but the most systematic demystification of nature. Indeed, during the last three centuries this program has been carried far beyond the necessities of human survival. We need not know how many rings there are around planet Saturn, nor is there any survival value in knowing when life appeared for the first time on earth. Nevertheless, our urge to know the properties of nature has its basic justification in the quest for survival.
It may therefore seem quite surprising that we find a second and different urge which, in some respects, is the very opposite of this demystification. There can be no doubt that men always craved for mysteries, riddles, for all that they don`t understand. They want to be overcome by the thrills and trepidation of what passes their comprehension. Surely, they need to demystify things if they want to survive, but they need mystery if they want to live. This contradiction is as basic to life as are order and chance, good and evil.
Now science does all in its power, to help with the demystification of things; while quite a different lot of men do just the contrary. Writers, painters and composers do all they can to restore the mysterious. In this respect art in its most typical expression is the exact opposite of science. Of course, art too assimilates outward world, it shapes nature after the image of man, imposes laws of its own, creates harmonies or reveals them. But it fulfills its most important task when it restores the mysterious, the tremendous and the unthinkable to our conscience. You may well ask yourself why an enlightened civilization like ours needs so much mental food which from the vantage point of science has no intrinsic value. Could men not be content with gathering useful knowledge? What for did they need art which never had for its primary task to provide them with useful knowledge? Was there any survival value in art?
To this question we would never find a satisfactory answer, if the main endeavor of man would indeed be nothing else than the demystification of things and the power thereby acquired. But as this is but one of two conflicting drives, he is simultaneously driven in quite another direction. It is one of his deepest longings to recognize himself in others: in men, in other living beings and even in so called inanimate nature. It is his aspiration to look into nature and to see himself there like in a mirror. This mirror may be fogged or broken. We may regard some parts of the world as if they were nothing but mechanisms, but then we like to look up to the heavens (with or without gods) in order to adore them as limitless reaches of the unknown. Indeed, some ideologists may even go so far as to regard the whole universe as a machine but they stop short when they consider themselves. At least it is their own luminous consciousness (or what they take as such) that they do not regard as a part of the machine elevating it instead to a godlike position. Thus, the urge to leave the fields of the demystified at some point in order to maintain its opposite: freedom and mystery, remains imperative even with classic determinists.
Scientists often had to desperately fight against their own prejudices. They accepted the teachings of art not as truth but as mere recreation. Ordinary men, who are neither physicists, chemists, behaviorists, neurologists nor Darwinists like Richard Dawkins (see below), have an easier access to truth. Not caring much about theories, they accept Art for the support it lends to their intuitive understanding. Art portrayed man as a free being even when it showed him overwhelmed by adverse strokes of fate. Art managed to portray nature as filled with the breath of freedom. Those wonderful landscapes behind the busts of Federigo and Battista di Montefeltro show no less beauty and grandeur than the two figures themselves. They are, of course, much more than the mere product of human hands. They represent nature behind man, peacefully giving him shelter at some times and destroying him at others with tsunamis, earthquakes and meteorites. Man`s environment is an external power which like death and birth is ultimately beyond his control. Once he recognizes nature for what it always was and will be, namely a power widely above him, he again bows in respect. Nature is his equal if not much more. Having recognized this, he is again susceptible to a state of happiness which he entirely lost while transforming nature into a machine. Nature as the fountainhead of both birth and destruction evokes the consciousness of inherent unity. Being made of dust, breath and flesh man feels himself to be one and the same within the universal current of life. Yes, in nature we are confronted with the same duality of freedom and laws which we find within ourselves. And both remain strictly unthinkable. Though we easily use those laws for our own purpose, we don`t know why they are there and where they come from. The mystery of nature`s laws is not in the least impaired by the fact that we know how to use them.
It is one thing, however, to know about these mysteries – true knowledge remains always aware of them – and to remain free of the effects of science on our emotional being. The more we progressed in trimming nature according to our needs thus making it more predictable, the higher we raise the emotional price to be paid for this very achievement. A man we made our slave and trained to slavishly obey our slightest whims offers no interest. From him we don`t expect any surprises; he could never become a partner in ideas or conversation. Despots always liked to torment those they had transformed into slaves, as if desperately trying to elicit some unforeseen response which would again elevate them to the level of man. This is exactly what happens with nature once we believe to have subdued it to our total control. Nature than turns dead and indifferent, it may even become the object of wanton hate and maltreatment. We hate her because we seemingly debased her to the status of slave. Having transformed her into a corpse we have no qualms laying her waste, filling her with all kinds of poison, destroying her millennial equilibrium. And we don`t even suspect that at the very moment of our greatest triumphs we are preparing nature`s revenge.
Of course, from the very beginning of our conquest of nature we were suffering from illusion. Through birth to death we have never been more than the rather helpless playthings of nature. We never subdued her, even if the success we achieved in particular fields produced the euphoria of unbound power. But we destroyed something precious within ourselves. Nature lost her true image as a mirror reflecting our own being made of dust, breath, blood and flesh. Instead she became something utterly strange. She turned into a void into which we were propelled by a mischievous fate.
Art alone served as a rampart against this aberration. Again and again artists managed to restore emotionally dead nature to life. While science tends to subject every singular case to a general rule freezing all things into pale déjà vu, Art extols the particular, the unique, the unrepeatable. It gives to freedom and the unpredictable its place against order and law, that is, its true place in life. Without Art, which makes us free from the urge to rule, we would have lost the faculty of comprehending the world as a whole.
Transcendence is everywhere inside and outside of man, in this respect it parallels predictability which we likewise find everywhere inside and outside of man. But, of course, to arrive at such conclusion we must be prepared to undergo some exertions of thought. These, however, are definitely not to the liking of everybody. For some they are hard to bear, for instance for those terrible simplificators who find rest only after they have made the world their own image: simple-structured and easy to understand. Creationists, at home in large numbers in the United States but under the name of fundamentalists natives of much of the rest of the planet, do not know of any unanswered questions, nor of any unrevealed secrets. Keeping in front of their eyes some holy book from the remotest past to which like to a fetish they immolate their own reason, they have ready-made answers to everything in the world. Indeed, this is essentially the most characteristic trait of a dullard. He believes to know everything. This makes him impervious to arguments and stubborn in defending the most outlandish assertions. Creationists will tell you that the world started exactly some 6000 years ago. They know that God has created man on the sixth and animals on the fifths day of genesis. Creationists pegged their own reason to the nail of some seemingly incontestable truth. In fact, they are in no need of reason; this heavenly gift doesn`t mean anything to them. As a rule they are ignorant and uneducated and even make this a matter of pride.
In short, creationists are the greatest enemies of transcendence. Even God as they riveted him on the skies is entirely made according to their own image. He lacks mystery as they do themselves and reality as they conceive it. Everything in God and in universe they explain according to their own comprehension. They have so trimmed infinity that it appears like a shabby cottage presided over by a quibbling patriarch. Creationists and their like already existed so two thousand five hundred years ago. That is why the Greek philosopher Xenophanes made them the target of derision. »If cows and horses or lions had hands and made works of art like men, the horses` gods would look like horses, the cows` like cows; and they would model the bodies of the gods upon their own«. This too is the way of all fundamentalists. When painting their God it is their own mirror image which appears on the canvas.
Don`t confound dullards with owls. The latter are quiet and intelligent animals. Looking into your eyes you might even believe to discover the semblance of wisdom. Sometimes owls are quite educated and inquisitive. They surprise by the range of their knowledge and the ease with which they make use of their reason. So the company of owls is enriching while that of dullards only produces more of the latter. It is no accident that Pallas Athena chose owls for her companions.
But mind you, owls are use only to the darkness of night. There they exert all their acuteness of sight and hearing, in short all their astuteness. During daytime, however, they are helpless an almost blind. You may therefore say that they do not ever penetrate the real mysteries in the colorful garden of reality. They only see black and white contours: its mere shadow.
Most representatives of this particular species are to be found among dogmatic scientists. More than anything else classical physics testified to this state of mind. Great knowledge, great acumen were easily welded to a staggering blindness in the heads of one and the same person. Today the specific outlook of classical physics may be thought to belong to the past but we should never forget that those who still defended it yesterday did so with an incredible amount of self-assurance and dogmatic denigrations of all differing opinions. For in this, even if only, in this respect they resemble fundamentalists which otherwise are their natural opponents. Dogmatic scientists too are enemies of transcendence. Dullards and owls, so different by nature, are here quite agreed.
After departing from their old world-view, that deterministic and seemingly all-embracing universal mechanism, physicists got much more circumspective. The same cannot, however, be said of other scientists. We have seen that some neurologists continue to cherish obsolete views in their own particular way when referring to human brain as a machine with deterministic functions. Man cannot ascribe to himself at one and the same time both the role as a god-like manipulator and that of a manipulated machine. The failure to understand this obvious shortcoming was one of our examples for that outstanding characteristic of owls which is their remarkable astuteness for minor things on the one hand and their lack of overview capability in broad daylight on the other hand.
There is another modern theory the proponents of which surprise by both tendencies. I refer to »explanatory« Darwinism, a theory resembling very much classical physics at its heyday in its claims to absolute truth and in its reckless denigration of opponents. The accent is here placed on »explanatory« for this part of Darwin`s doctrine is by no means identical with its descriptive section. »Descriptive« Darwinism traces the contours of the evolutionary process from protozoa to Homo sapiens; a process empirically confirmed by innumerable fossil findings and together with its many branches and dead ends linked to rather well defined temporal parameters. Only creationists and other enemies of precise observation and independent thought still question the truth of this particularly well proven theory.
However »explanatory« Darwinism is quite another matter. It purports to explain the descriptive doctrine by a simple and all embracing mechanism the gist of which it compresses into the formula »Survival of the fittest«. This mechanism essentially rests on two pillars. Living beings are born with differing properties that befit them more or less well in their struggle for survival. Some good properties enhance their chances to survive and produce much progeny; other bad properties make them die out. Natural selection of the fittest proceeds according to strict criteria which means that is contrary to chance. Any given property must be objectively better adapted to conditions surrounding the individual in order to enhance its chances of survival and increased progeny.
The second pillar of »explanatory« Darwinism deals with the question as to the origin and genesis of different properties in individuals. Here biologists refer to certain mechanisms in the genome, particularly to mutations.
Darwinian explanation of evolution has come to influence public discourse and world-view almost to the extent of classical physics in former times. If you read the texts of some of its most vocal exponents, such as, for instance, those ingenious and humorous books of Richard Dawkins, you will come to the conclusion – yea, you are supposed to reach it – that all great secrets and questions or life have now finally been solved. Once we fully grasped the origin and process of life, we have unveiled the secret of our own being.
If you want to know how science at its best surprises with detailed knowledge, ingenuity and enthusiasm read Dawkins; if furthermore you want to be instructed about the blindness of science to perspectives not placed immediately on the immediately visible surface of things then again read Dawkins. Hardly anywhere else will you find such a marked contrast between ingenuity in detail and blindness in overall perspective. It is quite revealing to deal with Dawkins` version of explanatory Darwinism.
For this
purpose we may restrict our arguments to the first of its two pillars.
Here
scientific content and empirical truth exclusively rest on the
assertion that
within a particular environment particular properties of individuals
give them
either better or worse survival chances. This is a theoretical
pronouncement
which may be true or wrong as facts may verify it or not. There seem
indeed to
be numerous instances corroborating the theory. The classical example
of the
black moth (Biston betularia)
is still controversial but for the sake of argument I will take it as a
positive example. Before industrial pollution had darkened trunks of
trees in
Not all evidence does, however, provide similar unequivocal results. The trail of a peacock is much of a hindrance in flight and, therefore, makes the bird more vulnerable to enemies; nevertheless there seems to be no natural selection favoring individuals with smaller or no trails at all. In order to rebut obvious objections of this and similar kinds, secondary hypotheses are proposed, much as the advocates of Ptolemaic world outlook resorted to an ever-growing number of epicycles in order to cope with exceptions and contradictory instances. Neither is it easy to comprehend why so many plants rely on fertilization by wind while others are more adapted to their environment by making use of alternatives like fertilization by insects or humming birds (sometimes nor more than a single species). Objections like these can, however, only be answered by the specialist. I want to base my argument on the assumption that all have been satisfactorily dealt with and that there are no falsifying instances contradicting the theory.
If we accept this optimistic assumption, does this mean that explanatory Darwinism is true? Would the problem of the evolution of life be finally solved by its rather simple mechanistic model?
This question must be answered with an emphatic no. Even if biologists should succeed in finding ever more properties which undoubtedly enhanced the chance of survival in the individuals concerned, this would by no means transform this mechanistic model into a formula for a general explanation of evolution. For on closer inspection the theory turns out to be metaphysical. As an instrument of general explanation it can neither be proved nor disproved because it simply passes beyond the boundaries of Middleworld. Dawkins and his followers are the advocates for a doctrine of overall explanation which they are utterly unable to prove.
Let`s turn back for a moment to the pivotal point of explanatory Darwinism namely to its contention that the chance of survival depends on whether specific individual properties provide better or worse adaptation to specific properties of the environment. For this statement to make empirical sense it is, of course, absolutely necessary that we know both the properties of the individual and those of the environment. Should one of these be beyond empirical reach the theory becomes inapplicable and useless. Now, as soon as we face the successive stages of evolution we see that explanatory Darwinism does, indeed, fall exactly into this trap of uselessness.
To start our argument let`s begin with looking into the future. We are placed at a point of time lying midway between billions of years marked by evolution already concluded and billions of years with evolution still to happen. Darwinism does at any rate accept and presuppose such an indefinite flow of time. But then we must reckon with future properties of the world at large and environments in particular which we don`t know and indeed cannot know at present. Let us therefore term them properties X1 to Xn. They arise by the same process as in the past namely by »fulguration« or chance if we prefer this term. New realities in the shape of environments originate from past ones without being derivable and predictable from the latter. Living beings will have to adapt to environments the properties of which we do not and cannot possibly know. We therefore conclude that »explanatory« Darwinism has no empirical grasp on the future since it must do without those properties of environment without which it cannot work.
Don`t overlook the parallel provided by the development of inorganic universe. As we have already seen, even a physicist knowing all the properties of primordial plasma and the laws to which it obeys is by no means capable of deriving from this primary stage the stages that follow for the Big, the Complex and the Later is not contained as within a nutshell in the Small, the Simple and the Earlier. The universe cannot be assembled by means of a construction kit.
Darwin`s explanatory model has no prognostic value with regard to an unknown future. This explains why the evolution of species necessarily stops short in the present. No biologist would dare to extrapolate it into the next billion years, even Richard Dawkins shrinks back from such a venture, though it is his outspoken belief that this model has fully solved the problem of evolution. Why does he not take his own conviction more seriously and calculate how man and animals will look like after a billion years?
We do, of course, know the reason for his reticence. In order to make any pertinent empirical predictions, he would have to know those future properties X1 to Xn of the environment which he needs for his formula. However, he does no more know them than anybody else. Such knowledge of creation lies beyond Middleworld.
This is a fundamental objection to explanatory Darwinism making it useless even for the explanation of the past evolution. Again we are forced to conclude that this mechanistic model (but not its »descriptive« counterpart) is no more than a metaphysical doctrine. The very fact that it is utterly incapable to predict the future of species – let us say after a billion years – is logically equivalent to the further and more general statement that it cannot predict the future from any point of time past, present or future. For what we term present, the moment we happen to live in, is not in any way an objectively privileged point on the time-scale.
Let`s take the natural evolution of eyes which Dawkins in his book »Mount Improbable« identifies as an almost trivial task. According to him, once a computer has been programmed by the »explanatory« model in an appropriate way, it has no difficulties in solving this task by trial and error. Let us remember. The theory has to rely on well-known properties of individuals as well as on specifically known properties of the environment in order to make empirical statements. But can it when it deals with the evolution of eyes?
Before anything resembling an eye existed, a fictitious observer couldn`t even suspect the existence of light. Of course, I don`t wish to say that no light existed prior to the emergence of eyes. What I want to say is that there was no light to make use of in the formula of the explanatory model. That is the point. For the model light was an X just as from our present vantage point the far future is full of those X1 to Xn. No theory of evolution could possible reckon with such an unknown variable in an empirical way.
But the
author of
Why? Is the year two thousand after Christ such a remarkable incision on the general time-scale? As to God or whatever else may be responsible for evolution, they certainly carry on without interruption. Just Dawkins and his computer who are seemingly so much at ease when explaining the past do not come to terms with the future. What the world and life on it will look like in billions of years they are utterly incapable of telling though only in this way they could verify the doctrines predictive value.
The mental bravado of a Richard Dawkins is nothing quite new under the sun. Only look at the attempts at universal explanation as proffered by classical physics. In both cases we find the same intention and we find it to be equally superfluous and futile. Some two hundred years ago the then famous mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace succinctly expressed the credo of physics as it prevailed up to the end of nineteenth century. »Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situations of the beings who compose it – an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis – it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes«.
Supposed
The
fundamental logical deficiency is the same in both the statement of
In normal life we face numerous events at every moment: such as a car accident, a crowd, a marriage procession. But in the place of every one of these specific events any alternative incidences might have occurred, and we would have credited them with just the same necessity only because they actually occurred. This does, of course, mean that we are incapable of predicting any events other than those which are mere repetitions of previous causal lines given strictly defined initial conditions.
Taking these facts into consideration we are led us to a most remarkable conclusion. Wonder and mystery need new definitions. If we only count as such those moments when nature happens to forget it`s own habits (natural laws) or even suspends them, then they will hardly ever be met with. In order to find them, science will have to go back to the very origin of our universe or to what it calls ≫singularities≪. But if we admit as wonder the uninterrupted occurrence of new and totally unpredictable events such as happened during the whole course of evolution, then wonders may be said to be surrounding us everywhere. For concrete events, say an accident or a marriage, are as unpredictable now as they were at the very beginning of history.
We may express the same truth in a more sober way. Whatever event we take into consideration, all of them are made at the same time of causal lines and the causally unpredictable. But for this very reason man would indeed be wholly incapable of influencing and directing things according to his intentions. We cannot alter an existing habit of nature (natural law), but we can and do exert our mental abilities by acting on the gaps between causal lines. In this way we are ourselves one of the forces of evolution, acting on things as we wish. Determinists never explained how nature fully governed by natural laws could coexist with free will. They knew, of course, that human endeavor acted on things and they had to admit that their very search for natural laws was nothing but an effort to make this endeavor ever more efficient. But they did not know how to reconcile this undeniable fact of everyday experience with their belief in determinism. Once we accept the freedom of man as well as that of nature, the riddle is at once satisfactorily solved.
But we gain even more than that. Our world turns out to be more rational and at the same time much more mysterious. Man is capable of transforming nature because with his planning mind he acts freely on nature`s freedom. But this is only one among a range of possible consequences, the one we meet with in our daily experience. Another one may be easily overlooked but we must give it equal weight. On principle it is not only our own mental volition and that of our fellow beings which may act on these gaps but any other intelligence in whatsoever way we may conceive of it. We could and we would not even notice the intervention of such an intelligence supposed that it had caused or averted an occurrence like the aforementioned car accident. In this sense transcendence around us is much more than just unthinkableness.
[1] Science as it exists at present is partly agreeable, partly disagreeable - it is agreeable through the power which it gives us of manipulating our environment... It is disagreeable because, however me may seek to disguise the fact, it assumes a determinism which involves, theoretically, the power of predicting human actions. (Russell, Skeptical Essays, (1953) London 1977; S. 35).
[2] More on this issue in Warum wir lügen, Kapitel: »von der Berechenbarkeit des Unberechenbaren«.